Let the Children Speak: A Poetry Workshop for Kids & Guardians

In tandem with the release of dreaming in the abandoned sculptor’s studio by Gabrielle Octavia Rucker, published by Sojourners for Justice Press, this intergenerational workshop, led by the writer on Sunday, July 12 at 4pm, invites children and their guardians to write, imagine, and build together. Grounded in Rucker’s poetry about Black childhood, sculpture, and mythmaking inspired by the work of Augusta Savage, we’ll explore poetry as a material practice, shaping language like clay and listening for what it wants to become.

Through gentle, generative prompts, participants will create poetic figurines, voice interior worlds, and reimagine childhood as a space of relation and revolution. Together, we’ll ask: What does it mean to stand in solidarity with children—not as symbols of the future, but as people living now? What forms can a poem take when we let it shape itself—guided by breath, body, and play?

This program is co-organized with Sojourners for Justice Press (SJP), an abolitionist feminist micro-press behind the Black Zine Fair in New York City. Founded by Mariame Kaba and co-directed with Neta Bomani, SJP publishes short-form print—zines, pamphlets, chapbooks, broadsides, and other DIY publications—by people working within the margins of independent publishing.

Gabrielle Octavia Rucker is a writer, editor and teaching artist from the Great Lakes (Waawiiyaataanong) currently living in the Gulf Coast (Bulbancha). They are a 2020 Poetry Project Fellow and a 2016 Kimbilio Fiction Fellow. Gabrielle is the sole operator and practitioner of the The Seminary of Ecstatic Poetics, a non-traditional, non-hierarchical learning space for the poetically inclined. To date the Seminary has taught over 300 poets and artists. Gabrielle currently sits on the board of the New Orleans Poetry Festival. Their debut poetry collection, Dereliction (2022), is currently available via The Song Cave.